Logan KONTAKT

DISCOVER | 21 MARCH 2015 | 386 MB

1977 was a great year. Star Wars came out in the cinemas. The Queen had her Silver Jubilee (where I got to dress up like a policeman in our school parade). And the Logan String Melody II was released. The String Melody had come out a few years earlier, in 72, but hadn’t been much of a hit. The mk II changed all that, earning itself a spot in the pantheon of All Time Greats. It looked stunning, with lavish 1970s real wood veneer and a delightfully responsive waterfall keyboard that made it a real player’s instrument. But that wasn’t why it was a hit. The reason is very simply to do with the sound it makes. It doesn’t sound much like a real string ensemble, but it sounds amazing regardless, and it’s graced a thousand hit tracks as a result. It’s thick, warm, rich, thoroughly analogue, and yet at the same time airy. It’s controllable, with drawbar-style faders to combine registrations, and attack and release controls too. And the five “Preset” buttons offer different settings of vibrato and chorus effect across all those synthesised strings, giving you huge, swirly, gorgeous acreages of pads that stretch on into the sunset… And we’ve sampled every last wonderful resonance of it for you!

Lambda KONTAKT

DISCOVER | 21 MARCH 2015 | 2.24 GB

First produced in 1979, the Korg Lambda ES50 was a monumental wedge of polished wood and analogue electronics designed to take the string synth concept to a higher level. It distinguished itself from string synths that had gone before on a number of fronts: it was fully polyphonic, not paraphonic; it had a host of real-time tonal and envelope controls over the sound; it combined string and ensemble sounds with key sounds like pianos, EPs and clav; and most of all, it included a rich, analogue, swirling, stereo chorus effect. This fact alone set it head and shoulders above its contemporaries. The Lambda’s chorus (which it calls “Chorus Phase”) makes for a superbly lush, expansive sound, thickening the strings and other patches, filling out the soundstage, and warming a whole mix with a single button-press. It’s a little touch of analogue magic! The tones are a great selection of sounds. The Lambda divides its tones into Percussive (for which read “keyboard”) and Ensemble (for which read “orchestral). On the Percussive side of the panel we get a great EP, a nice sharp Clav sound, a thick and funky Piano, and a very useful high-pitched Harmonics sound that combines well with the other sounds.

Jennings Mk2 KONTAKT

DISCOVER | 21 MARCH 2015 | 879 MB

This is what happens when you take 1950s valve-driven technology – courtesy of the amazing Jennings Univox valve synthesiser – and pump it with so many tachyons that it warps through its own wormhole into an alternate future. Well, not really. But that’s kind of what we were thinking when we started Jennings Mk 2: what would a massive analogue polysynth – the kind Roland were building in the 80s, say – sound like if the only technology available was 1950s valves? A multi-oscillator monster with all kinds of LFOs and modulation and so on, but with a valve heart? Well, no such thing exists, of course; so we built it. And it turns out it sounds pretty damn swell…

P15 KONTAKT

DISCOVER | 21 MARCH 2015 | 370 MB

Dating from the very end of the 70s, the EKO P15 is a rare and quirky Italian analogue which blurs the line between a preset machine and a properly controllable synthesiser. It has 15 pushbutton presets (hence ‘P15’), but these are joined by LFO, VCF and VCA sections with much more promising-looking sliders and switches. In practice, the LFO is always freely tweakable, while the VCF and VCA can be switched between Preset mode (in which case they don’t respond, because behind the scenes their settings are being determined by the Preset you’ve currently called up) and Manual mode (in which case you can adjust them to taste). It’s a rather fun system, and while there are obvious limitations – only Attack and Release on the envelopes, for a start – it can be a quick and effective way to get at basic sounds. It’s also a laugh to see just how unlike their namesakes the Presets sound: Panpipes is particularly un-panpipe-like!

SOTU KONTAKT

P2P | 18 MARCH 2015 | 1.3 GB

If you have even the vaguest interest in anything cosmological, you will no doubt be aware that NASA and other international space agencies have been sending probes out into the deepest recesses of our solar system and, with the aid of telescopes as well, have been recording the radio waves emitted by our universe and converting them to audio. The music of the spheres as was once referred to in the middle ages … or the Sounds Of The Universe … or SOTU.

Oday Audio Releases 16 March 2015

P2P, AUDIOSTRiKE, DiSCOVER | 16 March 2015 | 11.27 GB

KONTAKT, ZEBRA H2P, SFX, TUTORiALS, RAZOR NRKT, REX, MASSiVE NSMV, GEiST, PRESETS, Spire Presets

38 Releases P2P, AUDIOSTRiKE, DiSCOVER, 16 March 2015…

VIP Members Only Exclusive PresetBank V1 KONTAKT

PiRAT | 16/03/2015 | 880.44 MB

Exclusive PresetBank V1 KONTAKT